Steinfield, C. (2009) Prologue: The Future of Socio-Technical Systems. In Whitworth, B. and de Moor, A. (eds.), Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking Systems, Vol. II (712-714). London: IGI Global. Posted by permission of the publisher (www.igi-global.com).

This project was funded by National Science Foundation Award Numbers 0231584 and 0705186, in collaboration with Rolf Wigand of the University of Arkansas, Little Rock and M. Lynne Markus of Bentley College. More information is available at the VISTA project archive site.

These papers examine the possible roles that e-commerce and ICT use has in the context of local and regional business clusters. This work is an outgrowth of earlier research exploring connections between physical location and online commerce. Selected papers include:

Together with an interdisciplinary group of e-commerce researchers, Steinfield collaborated on the editing of two special issues of Information Systems Research on e-commerce metrics. The two cover articles from these special issues are:

A National Science Foundation (Award Number 9811568) project examined globally distributed engineering design teams (IIS-9811568). The International Networked Teams for Engineering Design (INTEnD) project included partners in the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Russia, and China. Teams of engineering students and professionals were equipped with a variety of communication and collaboration tools to enable truly distributed design work. As part of this project, a Web-based collaborative system called TeamSCOPE (Team Software for Collaborative Project Environments) was developed. Basic project information, including links to papers and reports, is archived at http://cscw.msu.edu/. Selected INTEnD and TeamSCOPE publications include:

Jang, C., Steinfield, C., and Pfaff, B. Virtual team awareness and groupware support: An evaluation of the TeamSCOPE system. International Journal of Human Computer Studies, 56 (1), January 2002, 109-126. (pdf available from publisher for fee)

In collaboration with Robert Kraut at Carnegie Mellon University, another National Science Foundation project (Award Number 9408271) explored the effect of e-commerce on market structures. Questions about buyer-seller relationships and the impact on intermediaries were explored.

In the mid-1980s up through the early 1990s, I presented and published a number of papers related to computer-mediated communication in organizational settings. Many of these are hard, if not impossible, to find online. Some of the work is based on my dissertation, Communicating Via Electronic Mail: Patterns and Predictors of Use in Organizations (abstract only). Others were papers with Janet Fulk and colleagues where we developed our social influence model of technology use (originally we called it the social information processing model). For most of these papers, please email me (steinfie@msu.edu) for a copy.

Steinfield, C. Dimensions of use of electronic mail in organizations. In J. Pearce and R. Robinson (eds.) Proceedings of the Academy of Management, 1985. (please email steinfie at msu dot edu for a copy)

Steinfield, C., and Fulk, J. On the role of theory in research on information technology in organizations: an introduction to the special issue. Communication Research, 14 (5), 1987, 479-490. (please email steinfie at msu dot edu for a copy)

Communities and Technologies 2007 (Springer 2007) Steinfield, C., Pentland, B., Ackerman, M., and Contractor, N. (eds.). This book contains the proceedings of the Third International Conference on Communities and Technologies, hosted by Michigan State University, June 2007.

Convergence: Integrating Media, Communication and Information, (Sage Publications, 1996) with Thomas Baldwin and Steve McVoy. This book explores the technical, economic, policy, management, and social issues raised by convergence between the media and telecommunications industries. It received the Cable Book of the Year Award from the National Cable Television Association in 1997.

Organizations and Communication Technology, (Sage Publications, 1990) with Janet Fulk. This book was a winner of the Research Book of the Year Award in 1990 from the Organizational Communication Division of the Speech Communication Association.